Noob character art questions
I have been trying to learn about topology, more specifically character topology for games. I have not had much luck with finding good tutorials on this subject so I had some questions
1 I see some people who have game models that are all triangles. It almost looks like they took a model with quads and sliced each of them into two triangles or something. I was wondering why people do that?
2 I have seen some people that overlap their uv's on certain parts of mirrored game models. I assume this is to be more efficient with the uv space but I am not sure if this is something to avoid doing because I also see some people who do not do it in their game models.
3 Should the arms of a character be separate objects from the sleeves of the character or do people just connect them inside the sleeve where it can't be seen? On a similar note should I add thickness to the ends of sleeves and collars of clothing by extruding in or just leave them?
4 If I have a high poly model that is made up of a bunch of different parts do I need to make it so all of the parts are morphed together in order to bake the normal map on the low poly or will it still be able to bake alright?
Also if anyone knows of any good tutorials that go through the entire process of making a character for a game I would really appreciate any help I can get.
Thanks!
1 I see some people who have game models that are all triangles. It almost looks like they took a model with quads and sliced each of them into two triangles or something. I was wondering why people do that?
2 I have seen some people that overlap their uv's on certain parts of mirrored game models. I assume this is to be more efficient with the uv space but I am not sure if this is something to avoid doing because I also see some people who do not do it in their game models.
3 Should the arms of a character be separate objects from the sleeves of the character or do people just connect them inside the sleeve where it can't be seen? On a similar note should I add thickness to the ends of sleeves and collars of clothing by extruding in or just leave them?
4 If I have a high poly model that is made up of a bunch of different parts do I need to make it so all of the parts are morphed together in order to bake the normal map on the low poly or will it still be able to bake alright?
Also if anyone knows of any good tutorials that go through the entire process of making a character for a game I would really appreciate any help I can get.
Thanks!
Replies
1. Triangulation is usually a game engine thing, so if the topology render is done in say Unity or Unreal you'd expect to see the quads triangulated, and sometimes it helps to triangulate before baking normals. It's just personal preference really weather or not you display with quads or tris.
2. Correct, this is to save on UV space, and also get more texel density out of a texture.
Again really just comes down to the asset, weather or not you can get away with symmetry or asymmetry
3. Depends on the asset, again, Connecting the sleeves with the arms is going to make the geometry air tight, but leaving it un-connected is going to say on your polycount
Example from the googles;
4. If you are baking from Xnormals, your highpoly can be as many parts as you like, but your low poly would need to be merged together
As for tutorials, here's a good start;
http://artofluis.com/character-creation-for-videogames/
There is plenty more information on this topic in the Wiki as well.
Hope i cleared some things up for you.
3. Depends on how tight the sleeves are and your budget. If poly count isn't a problem, its more common these days to have the shirt as separate mesh.
Lower budget character shirts, the sleeves just ends right there.
4. Multiple parts bake fine.
Maybe this can give you some idea? I'm sure there are some affordable ones on Gumroad as well.
http://en.9jcg.com/comm_pages/blog_content-art-180.htm